Sr. Systems Architect, Web Developer, Linux Aficionado.

Category: End User Blues

So.. ran out of time and didn’t have time to post my findings.. The highlight of the day was going to a clients office, and going through their pile of old hardware. While normally, that is not an issue or a day maker, I found some interesting items..

First, was a 128MB Palm Pilot SD card.. i haven’t seen cards that small in YEARS… boy did it take me back.. *will post picture later*

Well guess there is no second.. nothing was out of the norm to post about from yesterday…

For today, I got to deal with a customer that had ZERO concept of how their internet connection worked. While normally this doesn’t bug me, however as I explained that their main line went down, so the backup DSL line took over and was what was causing their VPN issues. She proceeded to ask about the first Comcast connection.. as I would tell her that there were no correlations, that the issue was one went down, she would tangent to the other connection and ask why it wasn’t working.. basically a giant circle.. UGH. Did I mention.. this woman worked for a finance company? yeah. Just the type of person I want handling my money.. HAH.

Not so much ranting as just annoyance.. nothing else exciting to report.. gotta put the computer away, been going since 7am this morning 🙁 blah wednesdays..

So.. When you have a client that uses Cisco’s encryption system for emails.. that usually means they are trying to be secure, or just don’t know any better right?

Those 9MB attachments are AWESOME just so you can turn around and forward it off to an email to be decrypted.. wait what? Yup. Gotta love clueless end users. I got to work with one, that had no concept of the term “Encrypted”, instead of opening the attachment and following the directions that Cisco so nicely puts on the page for you.. You’re supposed to skip the directs on how to open the attachment properly and just send it back so that their system does it for you.

While I understand that the reason the email forwarding service exists is because some browsers don’t open the encrypted attachments correctly, so then you need to send to this address to get it decrypted for you, but not even trying to open it properly.. comeon man!

</enduserrants>

Technology is only as “good” as the end user that is utilizing it is, I just love when tech isn’t used effectively.. yeesh..

Anywho, first day back after being in wire-less Georg- I mean, Georgia. Working through everything after coming back is a pain, it’s like I went on vacation and had to restart all of my thought processes from when I went on vacation.. except.. I never went on vacation -_- ooh well.

We had fun with our PRI provider today, and by fun I mean we are ready to go to their office and choke someone out! When you have a 24 Channel PRI, that handles an enterprise amount of faxes, you typically should have a service that won’t just randomly fail during the day.. right?

Apparently not.. What we thought at first was that our windows 2003 server was starting to go on us, so I rebooted it.. Upon reboot we found that there was still a line issue, calling up our provider let me know that they already had a ticket open and someone would call back in a half hour or so.. great.

Fast forward 2 hours, we were still having issues, and we had to actually pause all of the fax ports!!?! If we didn’t outbound faxes would have failed to send, and would have alerted the end users.. great, more emails from people..

After another engineer on our side sat fighting with one of the engineers on their side, we soon found out that they were going to dispatch a tech, great, someone was going to go on site to our datacenter and look at the line, no eta. Lovely.

Within a half hour, we tried sending out again, hoping that the system had come back. To our amazement it had!

From what I heard, they didn’t do anything, the system just decided to come back and start working again (lol), that’s always what I want to hear when i’m dealing with mission critical stuff, yup always..

So yeah, Faxing issues and dumb end users, highlights of an otherwise slow day..